From the course: V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max Essential Training

Color correction and layered compositing

From the course: V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max Essential Training

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Color correction and layered compositing

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- [Instructor] Now just before we get into the layered compositing tools that we have in the frame buffer here inside V-Ray 5, one thing that the more observant among you will have noted as we created our final render in the previous exercise, was the fact that whilst the light settings from our light mix were definitely pushed into the 3ds Max scene, the environment tweak that we had made wasn't. And so let's just quickly redo that inside our light mix controls. So 0.5, and then instead of pushing our edit back into the scene as we did last time, let's instead send this over to a composite now, and again pull down the UI divider if needed in order to reveal the layered compositing controls. Where we see a nested light mixed layer that can still be used to edit the individual lights in the mix if we want using essentially the same controls as found in light mix mode, or we can also use the basic compositing tools that we now have available, in order to tweak our scene in a slightly different way. So for instance, let's say that we decide to, again boost the key light in the scene by this time going from a value of one to 1.75 in the light mixed multi-player control. Now straight away, if we just make sure that the mouse cursor is set to read RGB and not raw values by clicking the toggle switch, and then hover over the brightest portions of the direct light on the floor, we can see that this is actually giving us blow out. So values above one in all of the available color channels. But if I just reset back to one here, and instead, right click on and add an exposure correction to the key layer, giving it a boost of 0.75, yes, we still get that blow out in our direct light areas. But what I can do now with also at the equivalent of a post-production column mapping to the mix by dropping the highlight burn value down to 0.3, which as you can see, massively helps with the problem. We can also do basic color corrections from inside the compositing controls if we want. So for instance, our environment image just outside the window here is looking quite colorful and so may perhaps compete a little bit far the viewers attention with the interior. In which case let's right click, add a hue saturation control, and just pull the saturation value down to about minus 0.3, which as we compare by turning the layer off and then on again, just takes away a little bit of the vibrancy, and so hopefully a little bit of the visual interest. As you are probably already standing to get a good idea of the level of flexibility that we now have here, one final tweak that I will make, is to select the source layer itself, and then add a filmic tone mapper to the proceedings. Now there are a good number of options that can be tweaked here in order to fully customize the way in which the toll mapper is affecting our image. Although all that I will do is quickly switch the blending mode over to average, and then call that done. Even though I could continue to add curves controls if I wanted, I could work with the white balance options blending modes, render elements, and the list goes on. Suffice it to say that the new compositing capabilities added to the V-Ray frame before window, whilst no substitute for a dedicated compositing application on a big project, can certainly get a lot done for us before our images ever leave the 3d S Max environment.

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